In mid-September, earlier this year, a team of overclockers sponsored by AMD set a new Guinness Record for clock speed by a silicon processor, setting an AMD FX-8150 processor to run at a staggering 8429.38 MHz. If anything, the coveted Guinness Record feat helped cement the general notion that AMD FX processors are good at overclocking. Sadly, AMD's record didn't last long, with renowned overclocker Andre Yang breaking it with his 8461.51 MHz feat. At this point we don't know if Andre had Guinness covering his feat to he could officially break AMD's record. AMD wouldn't mind it at all, because the new record was set using an AMD FX-8150, too. Andre did it single-handed, or at least he is the only person in the "Submitted by" field on the CPU-Z Validation page.

According to the validation page, 8461.51 MHz was achieved using a base clock speed of 272.95 MHz, with 31.0X multiplier, and a brutal core voltage of 1.992V (almost 2 volts!). As with AMD's record feat, an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard was used. A single 2 GB Corsair-made memory module was used doing 909.8 MHz (1818.16 MHz DDR) with timings of 9-9-9-24T. Like with AMD's feat, only two out of the FX-8150's eight cores were enabled. More details are awaited.

Maybe I'm harder to please than others, but it seems so small of an improvement that I'm not excited. It's only 0.38% (32 MHz) higher than the previous record. It's not like the previous record, which was about 150MHz higher than the one before it.

Even a Pentium 4 can run at 8GHz when you use super cooled liquids. It's hard to care about an overclock that isn't 24/7 stable, isn't using all cores, and doesn't have a sustainable cooling system.

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Intel will reach a wall with extreme cold so no matter how cold you get it or fast you push it, they just can't technically do it as well as AMD can due to AMD engineering to handle such low temps. But outside of testing or maybe scientific environments, not a feature the regular consumer will ever use.

But this is all irrelevant. We'll eventually get new design materials in mass production and finally see clocks much much higher than any of this. Been a lot of promising research over the past decade that is being put towards this.

I wonder if the performance is hindered by not incorporating the Hi-k Metal Gate process in this generation of CPUs. I know that they are supposed to finally make the jump with Piledriver when they come out. Intel's been using HKMG I think for 2 or 3 generations now, and it's been sucessful thus far. Hurry up and get the lead out AMD!! Show Intel that you can work fast too...